George W. Bush is smarter than you (2013)
keithhennessey.com
keithhennessey.com
https://vdare.com/articles/this-just-in-kerry-s-iq-likely-lo...
> According to a 1999 article in The New Yorker, he had a 566 Verbal - 640 Math, for a 1206 total (which would be about 1280 today [in 2004]).
>> "I recently converted Bush's SAT score to an IQ using the high school norms available for his age cohort. Educational Testing Service happened to have done a study of representative high school students within a year or so of when he took the test. I derived an IQ of 125, which is the 95th percentile."
>> "I think you're safe in saying that Dubya's IQ, based on his SAT score, is in excess of 120, which puts him in the top 10 percent of the distribution, but I wouldn't try to be more precise than that."
> The standardization report by Miller and Valentine says that the "officer population" that provided the percentile scores was about one standard deviation better than the average 12th grade male on the Verbal subtest and about two standard deviations better on the Quantitative test. This suggests that the 50th percentile among the norm group of Air Force Academy applicants had an IQ of about 123, thus putting Bush in the 125-130 range—a little better than his SAT score would imply.
Are students at Stanford Business School really so far below the 95th percentile nationally?
- The SAT indeed measures studiousness + intelligence, in which case, deriving IQ scores directly from it is highly misleading.
- The SAT is a decent proxy for IQ, which would indicate that universities have a very dim view on secondary education, and basically your intellectually gifted slacker can walk into a SAT exam, and easily outdo their less gifted, but hardworking peers.
Originally, SAT was short for "Scholastic Aptitude Test" and it was designed to measure "aptitude", not mastery of specific material. Many lawsuits later and SAT is now a meaningless initialism that stands for nothing.
> your intellectually gifted slacker can walk into a SAT exam, and easily outdo their less gifted, but hardworking peers.
Is accurate and true of many of my lazy-but-smart secondary school classmates.
This is correct, but it's not really relevant. The SAT subject tests (SAT IIs) explicitly do test knowledge of the high school curriculum, but they are psychometrically equivalent to the SAT I. That is to say, someone's SAT II scores do contain the same information that their SAT I scores do, and don't contain additional information (such as studiousness).
The reason that SAT II scores don't get confounded by studiousness is that taking SAT IIs is opt-in -- if someone takes the test at all, then they've been educated in the subject, and the residual is an IQ test just like the SAT. (Counterfactually, if everyone had to take the SAT II Latin, then stupid people with Latin training would often outscore smart people with no Latin training. But that's not the system we have; smart people with no Latin training, in reality, don't take the SAT II Latin.)
In my previous big bank company we had some tests for our internal business school. Tests were mostly IQ type so the result was that, in the first few years, school was filled mostly with IT people. Later they changed tests (e.g. live case study test) so more business people did manage to go to the business school. So I guess, the answer would be yes :)
(a) GWB is indeed smarter than most
(b) The author is kissing ass
But I think that looking at it in context, it was a piece that maybe liberals should have read. During the Bush years everybody liked to point out the gaffes Bush was doing as if intelligent college educated people never messed up a word in a speech.
The fact is that Bush is indeed smarter than the bulk of people who really relished in laughing at his gaffes, and in hindsight all that sniggering did nothing to stop the surge of increasingly radical right wing ideas.
Even from my very left-wing perspective I found the constant mocking of Bush worrying and elitist -- the first thing that should come in people's minds when they think about Bush should not be silly & almost endearing gaffes, but Gitmo, Irak, Afghanistan and the hundreds of thousand of corpses he left behind.
But you are right that a person’s actions (and policies in this case) is much more important than whether they happen to say silly things.
George Bush himself does indeed come from political royalty, which is why he did his best to present himself as the exact opposite, an average person.
Isn't this the case? Maybe less so at the time but this is his legacy and the first thing I think of is the wars he left and the evangelicals he mobilized.
What does matter is that he started an illegal war and lied to other nations to get them to join in on it, including the one where I live. That's why W. is still a worse president than Trump.
Edit: people seem to think this is an endorsement of Trump, it is absolutely not. Trump is a dangerous madman who will do anything to stay in power, but so far the damage has been limited. W. caused the death of millions with his illegal war, in that he is the worse president.
My point is more than the US can recover from this, recovery from Iraq was and is much harder. The dead will never come back to life and the region seems to be permanently unstable. My comparison was between a potential criminal who could have committed great crimes to one who actually did.
I believe the same is true of the American Mega-rich. They have simply gotten a lot better at hiding it. Use donations and legacy backdoors to get degrees. Be promoted to the 'board of directors' and claim credit for any growth the company sees, even if you're not involved in an active capacity. Be a varsity player in obscure sport with no competition, benchwarmer or not. Promote 'initiatives' that help <insert group that needs help>.
They know how to build resumes. In India, there is no pretense. These folks know how to socialize with the mega-rich and curry favor with them. But spend that long with anyone and even a dog would learn how to get treats.
Then there are memes. Those who kept their bitcoins in 2012 despite not knowing what they were and those who decided to invest big in drug development right before 2020. If you were banking on a massive 'once in a lifetime' event to propel you to overnight success without any real insights, then it is practically like participating in a lottery. Memes by definition, did not get successful due to their intellect.
I'm fairly certain that being a high-paid world class figure skater does not require high intelligence.
A figure skater might not be intelligent in the common sense, she wouldn't know a lot about world economics or physics, but I think she would definitely be life smart.
Not even that in many cases.
Some men are famous for being famous that have none of that but were at the right place at the right time.
> A figure skater might not be intelligent in the common sense, she wouldn't know a lot about world economics or physics, but I think she would definitely be life smart.
Or perhaps simply have fine motor control, balance and generally high aptitude for figure skating?
And I do think you underestimate how often success is either the product of being born into it, or a simple fluke as it so often is with celebrities.
Jennifer Lawrence apparently never even followed any acting lessons but entirely coïncidentally discovered that he had quite the talent for acting and fame, and the monetary benefits thereof, came entirely as a fluke.
Apparently this was such a big hoax that it has a Wikipedia page. I wonder how it spread globally considering social media wasn't a thing in the early 2000s.
The terminology changed (up into the period when FB became doninat, the term was usually “social networking” rather than “social media”), but the category has been going strong since the late 1990s.
But non-“social networking” web pages, email (including mailing lists), usenet, were also in play. Widespread communication via the internet didn't start with modern social media.
What amazes me about this hoax is that I'm from a country where English isn't widely spoken, but somehow many people knew about this hoax and believed it (possibly due to having a different sense of humour than, say, a British person, who is more likely to see it as a joke).
The one is analytics and hacking a problem to pieces. I know so many who are excellent at that. The other is synthesis and making a viable solution from all those pieces. I know so few who are able to do this.
I am very good at analytics as well but I earn my living by deriving solutions from my analysis with lots of creativity. I'm for sure not the best in my field but I'm oftentimes the only one with a solution at all.
What exactly is wrong with the silence? He was talking in front of young children at the time. Maybe he didn't want to scare the kids? Maybe he didn't fully hear what the agent whispered into his ear?
The article touches on this:
> Ask yourself: if every public statement you made were recorded and all your verbal fumbles were tweeted, how smart would you sound?
Allegedly, the real reason was to control oil. But was a war necessary to achieve that?
While the US spent trillions in war, China invested in infrastructure, manufacturing, education, etc. And as a result they're now catching up.
That make no sense at all. It is like stating "the US make the most car tires and hence must have the most rubber trees".
The argument is about access to oil reserves. The US emptying its oil fields faster than anyone else is not much of an argument. Looking at how many years of oil is left in the ground at the current rate of usage the US has less than 10 years left. Kuwait has not only twice as much oil as the US it also has almost 100 years left at the current rate of usage. Combine that with Iraq's also close to 100 years the US is in a very bad position. Had an enemy of the US 100% control of all that oil it could quickly become a problem. For example if OPEC either raised the price or stopped selling oil to the US the US war machine (and all of US society) could grind to a halt.
Now the biggest known oil reserves are in Venezuela. I wonder what that will do to Geo-politics....
Around the same time they put a base near the Guarani Aquifer, one of the largest freshwater reserves in the world.
The situation reminds me of the game Spore.
1 There is no evidence suggesting any war has ever increased US oil access.
2 All Middle East nations you mentioned are OPEC countries who do not individually set prices or determine customer preference.
> That make no sense at all. It is like stating
It's like stating, numerically speaking, oil was not a motive.
>1 There is no evidence suggesting any war has ever increased US oil access.
Saddam wanted to switch away from petrodollars. How would the US access Iraqi and Kuwait's oil then? Buying in another currency?
Refute the facts with facts instead of just saying NJET! It doesn't look good.
Fracking is what lead the US to rebound as the largest oil producer, and IIRC that became big after the invasion of Iraq?
The domestic oil production has been roughly like:
- 2000: ~100,000 barrels per day.
- 2016: ~4,000,000 barrels per day.
- 2019: ~15,000,000 barrels per day.
During the Bush administration (2000-2004), the US had a lower domestic oil production and a higher dependence on foreign oil.
Additionally, the oil production in the Middle East was much higher and has decreased over time.
But you will need a lot more than a business school anecdote to convince me that the man behind the Iraq War (launched on false pretences, with bad intelligence, and disastrous first- and second-order consequences) is a top-tier analytical intellect.
"[..]Professor Thomas Römer, an Old Testament expert at the university of Lausanne, was rung up by the Protestant Federation of France. They asked him to supply them with a summary of the legends surrounding Gog and Magog and as the conversation progressed, he realised that this had originally come, from the highest reaches of the French government. President Jacques Chirac wanted to know what the hell President Bush had been on about in their last conversation. [..]"
Source:
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/andrewbrown/2009/a...
Even if you assume Bush's motives were purely malevolent (or realpolitik if you prefer) then he was still terrible at it.
The whole world watches Hollywood films and buys American brands. If America becomes uncool and unpopular, that will be a loss that no number of aircraft carriers could make up for.
The comment I reply to was downvoted. I don't know why, it contributes to the discussion.
Lately, I feel like there have been a lot of reddit-like dislike-downvoting here on HN.
I hope the admins find a way to preserve the "maturity culture" I have always loved about HN.
*I know that will sound strange to you when you think about Bush and Trump, but remember that they did attract enough supporters to win the presidency.
I hate this kind of self-centered storytelling. The "dead silence" is embellished for effect, and the author of the story makes the student asking the question into a crude idiot so he can have his comeuppance with the witty reframing. The odds of the events in question actually happening as describe are nearly zero. It makes the whole thing read like an email forward from a dumb aunt.
When I think about the people in my own life that tell these kinds of stories, they're all awful to talk to. Every story involves them at the center of some otherwise anodyne situation where rooms full of people listen to them slack-jacked in awe of their perception and wit and charm. Drama comes almost exclusively by anonymous third parties being embarrassed by the repartee. Awful awful awful.
That this particular piece takes that already deeply unattractive personal characteristic and applies it to the context of partisan politics is somehow even worse.
The odds are that in the real story the majority of the students were borderline asleep, that the question asked was not a coded insult of Bush's intelligence but rather a curious student trying to learn about the division of intellectual labour in policy circles, and that the answer went over like a lead balloon because it involved evading the question to go on a moralistic lecture about how liberals are bad.
And if it did happen the comeuppance is cheapened by the fact that the author was a person with some kind of authority over the other person. You don’t really have to be a brilliant speaker or rhetorician in order to make your own students feel awkward...
My vantage point is Europe and I remember the Bush era, and I have seen this article before too. Bush came across as dumb, true ( I am looking for another word, something like not too smart ).
Northern Western media lean heavily towards US Democrats, I remember Reagan basically being described as the devil. In the same vain, Trump is painted as an imbecile.
The question I ask people who share these beliefs is : do you really think you can win the presidency of the US when you are below average? Of course not.
edit : dim might be the word indeed, borrowed from sibling comment.
The U.S.A. Democrats are portrayed as a lesser evil at best, and even that is starting to become a thing of the past since they assimilated various political factions that do not categorically stand for the little man, but only for themselves whom they believe to be a little man, otherwise not caring for the others, that are often rife with the authoritarianism the U.S.A. Republicans were known for.
> The question I ask people who share these beliefs is : do you really think you can win the presidency of the US when you are below average? Of course not.
No, but I, and many on H.N. have probably never had a serious conversation with a man whose i.q. is south of 100.
George W. Bush' i.q. was apparently estimated as 125 from SAT scores, so this thread reports — everyone I know who took an i.q. test is higher than that so 125 seems quite low, and to me insufficient to lead a country.
I would gander that most statesmen indeed have an i.q. north of 125, so that would make G.W.B. lower than average in that world at least.
Such vague words as “dumb” and “idiotic” are of course taken to be relative to the speaker's perceptions and milieu.
He opened up talks with the USSR and called out Gorbatsjov tear down this wall, mister Gorbatsjov.
I don't think the media is (only) to blame for that. When Trump speaks publicly, he isn't exactly eloquent - he goes back and forth, says the most bizarre things, and often rambles incoherently like a madman.
> do you really think you can win the presidency of the US when you are below average
Yes, you just need to be popular, and that is not a contest of raw intellect; it's about saying things that people want to hear, and having them hear you.
Yet you immediately pierced through the politeness as you call it, and embarrassed the student.
But kudos for being so polite about said student whom you clearly have a low opinion of.
Is there any recent non-inflammatory/non-partisan analysis that discusses about Biden's possible future strategy outside the US borders?
Eye roll.
George Bush, brilliant or not, earned his tainted legacy. If he was really so smart, perhaps he could have found a way to avoid that we are having this discussion about him now.
He's just lucky that President Trump came along to steal the title of "greatest criminal in the White House in the last 50 years" from him.
Pretty hard to make the argument than in terms of kill count Bush doesn't win this one
True, Trump was probably the most peaceful president since the 2. WW for the rest of the World. But he definitely stole the "greatest Fire-starter and stupidity talker" from Bush.
BTW: If he could make the thing with N. Korea, he would probably be reminded as someone like Nixon (not directly good but for sure not a abomination)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JhmdEq3JhoY
And nearly as legendary for policy failures.
https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2012/04/what-wa...
Unfortunately for the author - who incidentally was dead to rights about Trump, so he gets some respect for that - he's either wrong about Bush's IQ or he's wrong about Bush's character.
Because if he's right about Bush's IQ then the policy failures were either the result of ideology and negligence. Or they were deliberate.
I have heard these anecdotes about GWBush, but I see no reason to extrapolate them to other Presidents. Outside of his few gaffes, in public, Bush was visibly intelligent. He rose up the ranks organically (as organically as political royalty can) and had past experiences that had to instill some level of wisdom in him (military, being an avid reader).
Trump (as we know him) was born a Semi-Billionaire, and has been 'Construction Mogul and self-caricatured TV star' for his entire life. His time as a businessman is marred by more bankruptcies than successes, and his wealth (afaik) has grown slower than the stock market. He doesn't have any other experiences to speak of and has never been in a role where he (or his work) was accountable to someone else.
Some other surface level differences include their choice of/relationship with their spouses and the extent to which their children seem to be well adjusted.
Here is where I come with an analogy. Think of a professional cyclist. Success at the top level (outside of hard work) needs 2 things. An incredibly narrow set of cycling skills and a strong willingness to cheat (doping). Do either of them imply intelligence ? I think not.
That is also how I view Trump. Trump is a meme, whose narrow set of skills (influencer) and incredibly low moral bar propelled him to a once in a lifetime viral rise. Just like a meme, he seemed to find no success before and it appears is being considered to be cringe right after his meme cycle.
That being said, some members of the Trump's cabinet are definitely intelligent. Pompeo and Bannon clearly know what they are doing (as much a I dislike them) and if anything are some of the first public officials to have recognized America's collective failure in dealing with the CCP.
Maybe he used the full force of his very illegal program to spy on Americans to get their arguments ahead of time? :-)
I read (press secretary) McClellan's "What Happened", and two characterizations of GWB that stuck out, that match other impressions, is that first he's very "incurious". You can be smart and incurious, but it doesn't make it a good trait.
The other was the story about when GWB behind closed doors, with trusted people, said that he "honestly can't remember" if he did cocaine in his wilder years.
McClellan (who's not even done pot) found that absolutely unbelievable. Either you have or you haven't but you don't "forget" if you've done coke.
I agree. It takes a very dishonest person (to himself, or just others? We don't know) to claim something that absurd. The only way it makes sense is if he did so many different drugs that he can't remember which he did and he didn't. Still though… you'd remember doing coke, or not doing it. I don't think his wilder years had the synthetic drug legal classification arms race we have now, where you could actually not know if you got coke or coke-like.
Anyway, another argument is that he did actually manage to become president. That's not easy. The system may be corrupt, but the corruption cancels out a bit. You can't just coast because of who your (one-term) father is. You actually have to navigate politics to become the winner.
But yes. Smart people can make stupid decisions. Especially if they're incurious.
> This is a hard one, for liberals only. Do you assume that he is unintelligent because he made policy choices with which you disagree? If so, your logic may be backwards. “I disagree with choice X that President Bush made. No intelligent person could conclude X, therefore President Bush is unintelligent.” Might it be possible that an intelligent, thoughtful conservative with different values and priorities than your own might have reached a different conclusion than you? Do you really think your policy views derive only from your intellect?
This is a good question, for people on the left and right. Too often do people assume ignorance, then stupid, and then malice.
It's pretty smart if you ask me.
He could say yes, he could say no, he could say "I'm not going to discuss my past", but he said bullshit.
But even still, anyone asking "have you done coke in your past" or speaking about it as if it mattered is a retard.
But you're missing the point, and I don't feel like rephrasing yet again.